No, thought Charles grimly, this had not been some orderly exodus where people had fled the threat of predators. He didn’t know a serious musician who would have just left their instruments to rot—and not because the Martin was worth money. Unlike the careful laying out of their pets, this was disrespectful. He didn’t know what had gone on at Wild Sign, but he would find out.

He strode forward with the intent of joining his mate, took five strides, and stopped dead as darkness sent the hair on the back of his neck crawling. It wasn’t magic, this feeling. On old battlefields, pain and blood sometimes twisted the spirit of a place until merely standing on such ground made a man’s heart ache—or caused fear to rise through his bones. In old jails and psych hospitals, the spirit was so damaged it could make it hard to breathe.

A stride behind him, Tag swore, feeling it, too.

Something very bad had happened here. Not, he was pretty sure, whatever had made the people of Wild Sign leave their musical instruments behind. Something like this did not happen in a season. Two years after the Battle of Little Bighorn, Charles had felt nothing while he’d traveled over that ground. Ten years later, the spirit had been so heavy with sorrow, he had stood alone in the darkness and cried for those who had been lost.

This darkness of spirit had been here before the people of Wild Sign had decided to make this ground into a gathering place. It would have taken more than half a year to grow darkness this deep. He wondered why a group of witches would have thought it a good idea to come here. Did they have no common sense at all? How could they not have felt this?

“There’s something bad about this place, isn’t there?” Anna asked, watching them. “I thought maybe I was just spooked because of the dead animals and the abandoned instruments.” She looked around. “I don’t like it here. What happened to these people to make this place feel so awful?”

“It’s not the Wild Sign people,” Tag said, his voice certain. “This”—he swept a hand wide—“feels like Culloden.” Interesting, Charles thought, that Tag’s mind, like Charles’s, had gone to another battlefield for comparison. “It would take a great deal of horrible to make the deaths of forty people resonate in the land.”

While Tag had been talking, Anna’s toe had sent something rolling on the ground. She’d bent down and picked it up—a recorder. Doubtless there were other instruments scattered about and hidden by a season’s growth of grasses. Absently she knocked it against her leg to dislodge the dirt.